Fate of serial killer in jury's hands

STOCKTON - In one last attempt to save her client from a death sentence, attorney Lorna Patton-Brown ended her closing arguments Wednesday by standing before jurors and asking them to search their souls for mercy.

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By Scott Smith

recordnet.com

By Scott Smith

Posted Sep. 18, 2008 at 12:01 AM

By Scott Smith

Posted Sep. 18, 2008 at 12:01 AM

» Social News

STOCKTON - In one last attempt to save her client from a death sentence, attorney Lorna Patton-Brown ended her closing arguments Wednesday by standing before jurors and asking them to search their souls for mercy.
On an easel opposite jurors, she leaned an enlarged school photo of William Jennings Choyce as a boy, smiling and neatly dressed. The image of innocence contrasted sharply with the crimes Choyce, 54, committed in manhood, raping and murdering three women.
There was no denying her client killed the women from Stockton and Oakland, Patton-Brown said, but Choyce - a hard-working father of three who served in the Army after high school - would be punished enough by living out his days in a 6-by-8-foot prison cell.
"He was a little boy born into a world permeated with beatings," she said. "This was the world that warped him. It ground him down."
Her comments were the last arguments in a trial that began two months ago. Jurors found him guilty last month of the murders, which triggered a second phase in the capital case in which they now have to decide Choyce's punishment.
Jurors began deliberating late Wednesday and are expected to resume today.
Prosecutors presented Choyce as a sadistic serial killer who carried a "rape kit" - a fanny pack loaded with rope and plastic ties he used to bind women's limbs - as he drove around in a van described as a "rape-mobile," in which he assaulted and robbed prostitutes at gunpoint.
But Patton-Brown, throughout her questioning of the witnesses she called to testify, described Choyce as a man haunted by mental illness. He was raised by an abusive mother who would beat him while wearing a see-through robe, creating an atmosphere of erotic violence.
She also took her son on sexual liaisons, making him feel complicitous in her deceit against his father, Patton-Brown said. Choyce's parents still live in the family's Oakland home where they raised their children. Choyce's mother didn't testify in the trial.
His abusive childhood instilled in Choyce a rage toward women that he struggled to control from as early as age 10, Patton-Brown said. Finally, at 35, he lost control and lashed out, killing his first victim, she said.
A death sentence will not bring his victims back or soothe the pain felt by their families, Patton-Brown said, asking jurors to sentence Choyce to life in a maximum-security prison rather than lethal injection.
It's a decision they will live with for the rest of their lives, she said.
"You will know that this punishment you impose - if you choose life - is not a slap on the wrist," she said. "It's severe and its unrelenting, and you will have done your job."
Contact reporter Scott Smith at (209) 546-8296 or ssmith@recordnet.com.